AMERICA! Nation of idiots!

You know, I find myself wondering sometimes about our society in this country. Although as time has gone on I find myself less and less surprised by “people’s” stupidity, there are still times when I am (for lack of a better word) gobsmacked.

Case in point...

So, we’ve watched as the TV networks have milked a truly tragic event (and also seen the word HORRIFIC gain in popularity as well) for the last week. Nary a day has gone by when there has been some story or another about what happened up in Connecticut. News organizations are so preoccupied with it, they literally go about beating the bushes for any angle they can find... I mean it’s as if talking to the mechanic of a third cousin of the mother-in-law of one of the parents will gain some new insight to the events. Let’s just do everything we can to sensationalize this and boost our ratings!

It’s really sickening and then at the same time I feel bad for the people involved because they don’t get the privacy to mourn.

And then the insanity of something always seems to take people off guard somehow. This too is a bit amazing because if there is one hallmark of our species is that as much as you can dress us up in the trappings of civilization, deep down we are a barely civilized lot.

I can’t make sense of it anymore than anyone else can, it’s just sad.

But you have to really love the people at the NRA...

Yep, these are the people who really are out of touch with the world:

“I call on Congress today to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation,” LaPierre said. The proposed program, called the National School Shield, would help train and install security at schools nationwide under the leadership of former Arkansas Republican Rep. Asa Hutchinson.

“Innocent lives might have been spared,” LaPierre said, if armed security was present at Sandy Hook.  “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

LaPierre, Hutchinson and David Keene, president of the NRA, all declined to take questions from the press and said NRA press officers won’t be responding to the media until Monday. LaPierre in part blamed mass shootings on “vicious, violent video games” such as “Bulletstorm,” “Grand Theft Auto,” “Mortal Kombat” and  “Splatterhouse.” He also reached back in time to place blame on movies like “American Psycho” and “Natural Born Killers” for portraying “life as a joke and murder as a way of life.”

There you go, the problem isn’t that we have too many guns, or that guns are so easy to get, or maybe even being more specific that there simply is no good reason a sport hunter or someone who is interested in protecting themselves has to have a 50 round magazines and weapons better suited for war zones.

Nope.

We need more guns. Lots and lots of them! We should all have guns! Instead of a tax refund the government should just send us out a gun and some ammo (at least that’s what it sounds like the good people over at the NRA are advocating).

And really when you get right down to it... it’s VIDEO GAMES! Those f%*&ing video games are just screwing this nation up! It’s amazing we could conduct wars with video games and send young people around the world to kill other people because video games made their minds into muck!

You might think I’m a pacifist (and I’m not) or you might think I believe no private citizen should own a gun (which I don’t - people should be able to own guns if they choose) but there is simply no question that selling weapons like the Bushmaster (which is basically a M-16) to the general public is a recipe for disaster. And that there are people who don’t want to recognize the differences between limiting the sale of these weapons and the rifles that hunters use or the sidearms people carry for protection really is the height of stupidity.

 

The AR-15 rifle was first developed by the Fairchild ArmaLite corporation in 1957. ArmaLite sold the rights to the design to Colt in 1959, and the weapon was adapted for military use as the M16; it went in to service in Vietnam in 1963. The modern AR-15 is a demilitarized version of the M16, and is now manufactured by several companies including Bushmaster, Colt and ArmaLite. It is a lightweight, small-caliber semi-automatic rifle, with a light recoil and a variety of optional barrel lengths and targeting/aiming devices.  Minnesota Sen. Michelle Bachmann said during her presidential campaign that the AR-15 is her favorite gun “because you can be so accurate with it.” Depending on the make, model and options, an AR-15  can cost anywhere from $900 to $2000.  Because it falls under the federal definition of the term “assault weapon,” the AR-15 has long been a target of anti-gun legislation. “It was one of the weapons [specifically] banned by the Assault Weapons Ban legislation in 1994,” Christopher Koper, criminology professor at George Mason University tells TIME. According to the U.S. Code, an semiautomatic weapon can be “any repeating rifle which utilizes a portion of the energy of a firing cartridge to extract the fired cartridge case and chamber the next round, and which requires a separate pull of the trigger to fire each cartridge.”

 And if the people over at the NRA can’t see the distinction and get on board let’s give their program a go – put the National School Shield into practice with one caveat...

Make the NRA pay for it.